Gartner recently conducted a survey of 2,053 CIOs, asking what's going to be important over the coming year. If you look at the lists below--for technology and business priorities--there probably aren't too many surprises. Analytics/BI tops the list, followed by mobile, then cloud, and so on.

(Credit: Joe McKendrick)

The piece of bad news is the economics. Gartner said that the average CIO IT budgets are down 0.5 percent from a year ago. However, everyone should be used to it--CIO IT budgets "have been flat to negative ever since the dot-com bust of 2002."

The three main anchors of service-oriented technologies--cloud, legacy modernization, and virtualization--make the list, at numbers 3, 5, and 8 respectively. Not the top of the list, but at least on the list. Of course, it can be argued that the business side isn't really tuned into service technologies--but business types are very excited about analytics and mobile. In fact, CIOs brand these technologies as "disruptive"--mobile (70 percent), analytics (55 percent), social media (54 percent), and public cloud (51 percent).

What's really new and different is evidence that CIOs are increasingly evolving into "chief digital officers" (CDOs). This is more than semantics; it suggests a shift away from overseeing systems and applications to overseeing their organization's efforts to build new channels and markets. (Well, actually, "CIO" might still be a better label, since the impetus is still harvesting value from information, not just being "digital.")

Nevertheless, almost a fifth of CIOs now act as their enterprise's CDO, leading digital commerce and channels. More CIOs "will find themselves leading in areas outside of traditional IT," Gartner predicted, especially since they are starting to oversee digital business initiatives. In fact, Gartner said that 77 percent of CIOs surveyed "have significant leadership responsibilities outside of IT." Compare this to 2008, when almost half of CIOs had no responsibilities outside of IT.

Ultimately, a CDO posture may attract far more corporate budget dollars than the traditional IT-centric CIO role, Gartner suggested. "Reacting to limited budgets by restructuring costs, outsourcing and doing more with less made sense from 2002 to 2011, when the supply of innovative technologies was scarce. Adapting to, and leading, in the digital world requires doing things differently, yet in ways consistent with the demands of digital technologies."Open the floodgates.

Joe McKendrick is an author and independent analyst who tracks the impact of information technology on management and markets. Joe is co-author, along with 16 leading industry leaders and thinkers, of the SOA Manifesto, which outlines the values and guiding principles of service orientation. He speaks frequently on cloud, SOA, data, and...
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Joe McKendrick is an independent consultant, editor and speaker. Joe has performed project work (white papers, articles, blogs, research and presentations) for the following companies in the IT marketspace: CBS Interactive/CNET/ZDNet (this blog) ebizQ Evans Data Gartner IBM Informatica IDC Microsoft Systinet/HP Teradata Unisphere Reseach, a division of Information Today, Inc. WebLayers Joe has also performed research work for the following sponsoring organizations in partnership with Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc. IBM Luminex Noetix Oracle Corp. Teradata Informatica International Oracle Users Group Oracle Applications Users Group Professional Association for SQL Server International DB2 Users Group International Sybase Users Group SHARE (IBM large systems users group)